This invention relates to a document reproduction apparatus and in particular to an unlimited catch tray for operating in various modes.
In reproduction machines, particularly machines for high speed, high volume reproduction runs, the production of copies by the machine can often exceed the capacity of the copy sheet storage. Many attempts have been made in the prior art to correct this problem. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,012,032 describes a copy sheet handling system having a copy sheet receiving tray for use in operating in a non-collate mode and a plurality of collator bins for operating in the collator mode. In this system, the control senses when the non-collate tray has reached capacity and automatically directs documents to the collator bins. Similarly, if operating in the collator mode and the requirement exceeds the number of collator bins, a prortion of the job requirement is stacked in the non-collate tray.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,026,543 teaches a control system using a copy count, a tangent copy count, and a document tracing indicator to provide automatic control for copy overflows. U.S. Pat. No. 4,134,581 describes a system having a plurality of collator bins treated as one virtual bin and sheet feedings controlled by skipping adjacent bins if the document sets to be copied having a number of papers exceeding the capacity of a single bin. U.S. Pat. No. 4,072,304 teaches a system having a collator running in two distinct modes, in particular allowing the collator to continue operation by a sheet feeding malfunction and portions of the stacks having an error are directly offset from the properly collated stacks. In the other mode, the collator feed is disengaged.
Other systems such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,072,854 generally teach copy sheet counting in particular to determine if copy sheets are improperly overlapped and U.S. Pat. No. 4,003,569 to detect the last copy sheet in a particular run.
In these systems, generally a multiple copy receipt trays or bins are required. In addition, even though a multiple or plurality of trays are in use, the trays generally have limited capacities requiring either additional control for tray switching, system shutdown or additional operator intervention.
Other systems such as Xerox U.S. Pat. No. 3,871,643 teaches a sorter system having two sorter sections. In particular, the control switches from one section to the next to continue a reproduction requirement. In addition, if the bins in both sections of the sorter contain copy sheets, and the job requirement has not been completed, upon removal of the copy sheets in one of the sections, the reproduction machine will resume operation after having been temporarily halted.
The addition of multiple bins and trays increases the cost of the components for the machine and adds complexity to the control. It would therefore be desirable to provide a reproduction system, a high volume reproduction machine having a minimum number of copy sheet receiving trays and yet be able to handle high volume requirements with minimum operator intervention.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a new and improved reproduction machine having a minimum of components and high volume capability.
Further advantages of the present invention will become apparent as the following description proceeds, and the features characterizing the invention will be pointed out with particularity in the claims annexed to and forming a part of this specification.
Briefly, the present invention is concerned with a reproduction machine having a single output catch tray and operating in stacks, unstapled sets, stapled sets mode, the sets and stacks being offset in the catch tray. In the various modes of operation, the reproduction machine will temporarily halt upon the output tray reaching predetermined capacities depending upon the mode of operation. However, upon emptying the contents of the output tray, the machine will resume operation and continue to do so as the tray is emptied until the completion of the requirement or until the job in process is cancelled.